Characters and events of Roman History eBook

Surely he first shed Christian blood; but if we consider
the tendency he represented in Roman history, we can
hardly classify him among the great enemies of Christianity.
Unwittingly, Augustus and Tiberius were two great
enemies of the Christian teachings, because they sought
by all means to reinforce Roman tradition, and struggled
against everything that would one day form the essence
of Christianity—­cosmopolitism, mysticism,
the domination of intellectual people, the influence
of the philosophical and metaphysical spirit on life.
Nero, on the contrary, with his repeated efforts to
spread Orientalism in Rome, and chiefly with his taste
for art, was unconsciously a powerful collaborator
of future Christian propaganda. We must not forget
this: the masses in the Empire became Christian
only because they had first been imbued with the Oriental
spirit.

Nero and St. Paul, the man that wished to enjoy all,
and the man that suffered all, are in their time two
extreme antitheses: with the passing of centuries,
they become two collaborators. While one suffered
hunger and persecution to preach the doctrine of redemption,
the other called to Italy and to Rome, to amuse himself,
the goldsmiths, weavers, sculptors, painters, architects,
musicians, whom Rome had always rebuffed.

Both disappeared, cut off by the violent current of
their epoch; centuries went by: the name of the
Emperor grew infamous, while that of the tent-maker
radiated glory. In the midst of the immense disorder
that accompanied the dissolution of the Roman Empire,
as the bonds among men relaxed, and the human mind
seemed to be incapable of reasoning and understanding,
the disciples of the saint realised that the goldsmiths,
weavers, sculptors, painters, architects, and musicians
of the Emperor could collect the masses around the
churches and make them patiently listen to what they
could still comprehend of Paul’s sublime morality.
When you regard St. Mark or Notre Dame or any other
stupendous cathedral of the Middle Ages, like museums
for the work of art they hold, you see the luminous
symbol of this paradoxical alliance between victim
and executioner.

Only through the alliance of Paul and Nero could the
Church dominate the disorder of the Middle Ages, and,
from antiquity to the modern world, carry through
that formidable storm the essential principles from
which our civilisation developed: a decisive proof
that, if history in its details is a continuous strife,
as a whole it is the inevitable final reconciliation
of antagonistic forces, obtained in spite of the resistance
of individuals and by sacrificing them.

Julia and Tiberius

“He walked with head bent and fixed, the face
stern, a taciturn man exchanging no word with those
about him.... Augustus realised these severe
and haughty manners, and more than once tried to excuse
them in the Senate and to the people, saying that
they were defects of temperament, not signs of a sinister
spirit.”